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12 August 2015
Student guest post: the Belt Supergroup in Glacier National Park
As longtime readers know, late summer is when my Rockies students submit their final projects – web-based explanations of key geologic sites they examined during the trip. Today, I offer you a guest blog post by student John Leaming. You’ll notice that I’m not *completely* absent from the post, however – I make a couple of cameos as “sense of scale.” Enjoy, -CB ______________________________________________________________ Glacier National Park, Belt Supergroup I …
7 August 2015
Friday fold: Yin-Yang at Swift Dam
What is Matt looking at here? Matt was one of my Rockies students this summer, a geology major at the University of Virginia. Together with another UVA student and students from Mary Washington University and George Mason University, Matt embarked on a mountain-climbing hike during our evening camping at Swift Dam, near Depuyer, Montana. The hikers were treated to an extraordinary sight when they attained the summit: Click to embiggen; …
24 July 2015
Friday folds: Fox’s and Foch’s
A final Friday fold (for now) from Howard Allen: This is : A view south across Kananaskis Lakes, Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, Alberta, through mist/low-hanging clouds. Snow highlights the Sarrail Creek Syncline and Warspite Anticline on the north faces of mounts Fox (left/east) and Foch (right/west). Rocks are Lower Carboniferous carbonates of the Banff, Livingstone and Mount Head formations. Happy Friday all – and thanks for sharing all these great …
3 March 2015
Ichnofossils in Gog quartzite
At the Spiral Tunnels overlook on the Trans-Canada Highway, you can look at trains. Or, you can check out some lovely trace fossils in boulders which divide the viewing area from the highway: These are in the Gog Formation, a Cambrian-aged quartz arenite, mostly fused to quartzite nowadays… I know which subject I would choose to spend my time looking at…
6 February 2015
Friday fold: Ouray Limestone, Colorado
Kim Hannula shares a fold today: Kim says: The rocks folded here mostly the Devonian Ouray Limestone. There’s a fault through the outcrop, and another fault to the left of the photo. Regionally, the faults are mapped as normal faults, mostly with the east (right in photo) side down. Locally, that’s not what I see in this outcrop, which makes this a funky place to look at a fold with …
26 October 2014
Bedding / cleavage relations in the Stephen Formation, Yoho NP
Good afternoon! Here are a few photos, both plain and annotated, showing the relationship between primary sedimentary bedding and tectonic cleavage in the “tectonised Stephen” Formation atop the Cathedral Escarpment (in Yoho National Park), just northeast of the Walcott Quarry where the (thicker, basinward) Stephen Formation hosts the Burgess Shale. Weathering exploits both these planes of weakness… Here, the cleavage is more planar at the bottom of the sample, and …
4 July 2014
Friday fold: Warspite Anticline
A final guest Friday fold from reader Howard Allen, who I’m pleased to be meeting up with in Banff late next week… Howard writes the following in describing this lovely scene: Warspite Anticline, Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, Alberta. Photo is a telephoto shot (hence the strong blue alpine haze–the colour cast is an accurate rendition of the original daylight Kodachrome slide), looking southwest at an angle to regional strike. The …
26 December 2013
Mississippian invertebrates from the Lodgepole Limestone
On a cold winter’s day, Callan harks back to a summer’s afternoon fossilizing in the Rocky Mountains. A few choice images of Mississippian-aged marine invertebrates are shared.
24 October 2013
Exploring Wind River Canyon’s Great Unconformity in outcrop and hand sample (via GigaPan)
Over the summer, I shot these two GigaPans of the “Great Unconformity” in Wind River Canyon (Owl Creek Mountains), Wyoming: link link This week, Team M.A.G.I.C. (by which I mean my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone) finished up a series of three macro GigaPans of rock samples from the site (made with our one-of-nine-in-the-world GIGAmacro rig by Four Chambers Studio): link link link In combination, these five images could be used to …
11 October 2013
Friday fold: below the Dorado Thrust
Here’s a scene from last summer’s Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies course… students examining and sketching some tight folds in Cretaceous strata of the Western Interior Seaway, crumpled beneath the Dorado Thrust (a more southerly equivalent of the infamous Lewis Thrust to the north)… I’ve featured this site before, in a previous Friday fold. Photo courtesy of Tom Biggs, University of Virginia.
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.